Brumm Speaks Out: A preventable, unfortunate situation

Last week I had the unpleasant experience (once again) of talking with a contract grower who was faced with a bill for pig death loss due to a ventilation failure. It’s not a lot of fun talking through the sequence of events and having to tell them that the evidence points to negligence on their part and my opinion is that they should pay the bill.

At this site, for some reason the main breaker into one room of a double-wide tunnel finisher was either tripped or turned off. I say tripped or off because I didn’t talk directly with the person who reset the breaker, etc. The net consequence of this breaker being off was no electricity to the controller or ventilation fans in the room.

There was an emergency alarm at the site and it was wired for incoming power to the facility and high/low temperatures in both rooms. Because the alarm was wired to the incoming power and not the power to either room, it failed to detect the loss of power to an individual room within the facility.